Amazon.com continues to enhance its cloud-based platform for electronic commerce (EC2) with bells, whistles and data designed to inspire developers to augment Web-based offerings . Last night the company added over a Terabyte of information that are snapshots of “Public Data Sets” designed as a central repository for publicly available information that can be a boon to any cloud computing strategy.

Amazon will continuously add new data, but the initial upload includes the entire English section of Wikipedia; core U.S. economic data from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Transportation; chemistry and biologivsl data from a multiplicity of sources, inclulding an annotated version of the human genonme (from ENSEMBL) among other snapshots and extractions.

Food for Innovation – It’s been clear for quite a while that Amazon.com’s business aspirations go far beyond online retailing. Those aspirations, and those of its application developers employing EC2, are destined to extend the definition customer care and assisted self-service. Integrating massive amounts of data and meta-data into Web based (and ultimately mobile) applications redefines end-user expectations and usage patterns. Imagine an “Answers” type application with the sum of human knowledge at its core.

Inasmuch as it is tapping into publicly available data sets, it is able to bring all this knowldedge to bear without violating individual privacy. Amassing such data centrally in “the cloud” is bound to lead Web and mobile service development into some unexpected directions.

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